


the sky is more blue

by maketea



Series: adrienette.mp3 [5]
Category: Miraculous Ladybug
Genre: Aged-Up Character(s), Beach Holidays, F/M, Idiots in Love, Love Confessions, Mutual Pining, Post Reveal, Pre-Relationship, a brief and hypothetical mention of sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-06
Updated: 2020-12-06
Packaged: 2021-03-10 03:07:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,812
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27917239
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/maketea/pseuds/maketea
Summary: hoping i just stay the same and nothing will changeand it’ll be us, just for a whiledo we even exist?they were sensible. they followed the rules.but when the rules forbade them from falling in love...well. they'd broken that one before it'd even been a thing.(and, just maybe, that rule was better off broken, anyway).
Relationships: Adrien Agreste | Chat Noir/Marinette Dupain-Cheng | Ladybug
Series: adrienette.mp3 [5]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1596409
Comments: 30
Kudos: 279





	the sky is more blue

**Author's Note:**

> malibu - miley cyrus

Sometimes she had an inkling that Adrien only ever smiled for other people. Photoshoots, paparazzi, interviews where microphones were stuffed in his face and snatched away before he could finish his sentence. Today, he was smiling all for himself.

He crouched in the water and pumped his red plastic water gun a few times, an eye on Nino's own gun and a lopsided, absentminded grin on his face. Adrien Agreste the model, Adrien Agreste the model student, Adrien Agreste with the styled hair and pressed clothes and pretty boy smile was nowhere to be found.

This was Adrien. Just Adrien. Her kitty-cat. The boy who called her his lady across rooftops and once hit himself in the face with his baton and sometimes stood so close to her she'd have to step back before she gave into the temptation and kissed him.

She wasn't supposed to look at him like this, but the ribbons of pink sunset lacing through the sea and the water-sprayed hair he kept flicking out of his eyes were doing little to convince her that keeping romance out of their superhero partnership was worth it. He looked so beautiful she couldn't even feel sad about what she was missing. Did it matter that they couldn't date? That she couldn't hug him from behind with the waves creaming around their calves and place her cheek against the part of his shoulder blade Nino had gotten in a shot with his water gun? She loved him all the same, she knew he loved her, and the evening was too perfect to feel anything other than a tranquilising sense of serenity.

"You've been staring at Adrien for the past ten minutes," Alya said from beside her. She had a pocket-sized notepad open in her lap, their sandy parasol leaning shut against her thigh from when they’d decided they'd rather watch the sunset without it.

Marinette scoffed. "I have not."

"Well, then you're giving  _ Nino _ heart eyes." She lifted an eyebrow, though it disappeared under the brim of her sunhat. "Is that the road you wanna go down?"

"You're horrible, you know that?"

"Journalists always get a bad rep." She clicked her pen a few times, still giving Marinette  _ that  _ look. The 'you're-my-best-friend-don't-lie-to-me' look. "What's going on with you two? You've both been acting weird since you revealed your identities."

Marinette bit her lip.

She never regretted telling Alya she was Ladybug (though Alya insisted that tumbling into her bedroom mid-transformation because she'd forgotten they'd been having a sleepover did not constitute as 'telling') but times like these made her consider calling up Bunnix and asking to revert that little event.

Although reluctantly, Marinette lowered her gaze back to her book. "Nothing. I told you already. We think it'd be better if we just stayed friends."

"You're a terrible liar."

"Thanks," Marinette said drily. "I'm reading my book, now."

Alya pressed the clicker of her pen against the book and pushed it to the ground. "No. We're talking about Adrien."

"Sounds like  _ you're  _ the one who's in love with him."

There was a pause. A slow grin spread on Alya's face. "Who said anything about being in love?"

Marinette felt her ears go red. Still, she stood her ground. "That's what you were thinking."

"I asked what was 'going on'."

"But you were thinking it."

"Wanna know what I'm thinking? Honestly?"

She nodded mutely, hyper aware of the heat in her ears metastasising to her cheeks.

"I think you guys are sleeping together — girl, do not have an aneurysm on me, you are eighteen years old — you guys are sleeping together, but you're still in love with him, and you're about to get yourself hurt." Her voice softened. "I don't want to watch you make a mistake like that, Marinette. I don't want you to hurt like that."

For a long while, Marinette just stared at her, spluttering. Where could she possibly begin to digest that? Sleeping with Adrien was… yes, something she may have briefly considered right at the beginning, but she was smart enough to not entangle herself into  _ that _ arrangement. Dating was simply in the territory of what they could not do, not the territory itself. Sleeping together  _ definitely _ shared that territory. It'd all be fun and games until one of them blurted out 'I love you' and the other followed suit.

She was half annoyed that Alya would assume she'd do something so stupid, but too touched by the fact she cared to get mad.

"Okay, first of all, we aren't sleeping together. Don't look at me like that, we aren't. Even if we wanted to, we literally do not have the time." She looked down at her legs, dusted with sand and framed by her white tankini shorts. "And… okay, yeah, I'm still in love with him. What a shocker."

Alya had one of the widest grins Marinette had ever seen. She was too starry-eyed to even push her drooping sunhat away from her forehead, which led Marinette to doing it for her.

"I knew it," she said, emerging from her stupor.

"Okay."

"I'm just too good."

"Right."

"I should drop out of uni and become a detective— no, a private investigator! I'm already certified. I'd be the best in the business."

Amused, Marinette tried finding the last line she had read in her book. "I love you and all, but I really don't think me being in love with Adrien was  _ that _ tough of a case to crack. Even he knows."

"Marinette, just let me have this— wait, what?"

Suddenly, the book Marinette had not been paying attention to appeared  _ incredibly  _ interesting.

"Marinette." Alya leaned in. A tendril of dark hair escaped her bun. "Marinette. Marinette. What."

_ Incredibly  _ interesting, indeed.

In Alya's defence, Adrien hadn't sleuthed around to find out.

Marinette had told him herself.

It had been a short, simple exchange, taking place a little bit after they'd instated their dating ban. It was so simple, in fact, she had fumed at her fourteen-year-old self for two weeks afterwards for not telling him sooner.

He'd been agonising over which photo to use for his profile picture on Instagram, flicking between three of his most recent selfies (he didn't like using photoshoot shots for his personal accounts. Too airbrushed, he always said).

"They all look good to me," she had said, sipping her milkshake.

"They can't  _ all _ look good. They all look weird if you look at them long enough. Look." He zoomed into the one currently on his screen. The denim jacket she loved on him disappeared as he enlarged the photograph so only his face was visible. "My eyes look squinty."

She'd looked at it for a moment, then shook her head. "If you want an objective opinion, Alya's your girl. She's not in love with you."

He'd stared at her. "And you are?"

And Marinette had nodded. She'd just  _ nodded _ .

"Oh. I see," he'd said, and took back his phone. "I think I'll just go for this one."

Now, Marinette busied herself looking around for her bookmark. "I don't know, Alya, it'd just slipped out."

"What, when you told Adrien, or when you decided to tell me you told him?" 

At that, Marinette looked up.

Alya put her hands out. "Wait, sorry, that sounded harsher than I'd wanted. I swear I'm not mad — this is actually really funny — but— how? When? Why?"

"Ugh, it was stupid. He'd just gotten into my head with all those roses and rooftop dates and all those stupid  _ My Lady you know you're purr-fect _ s." She slid her eyes back to the sea. Nino, whose face and neck were dripping with water, was roughhousing Adrien, trying to dunk his head into the coming tide while they both laughed. "And I thought… well, if he's put all his cards on the table, why shouldn't I?"

"And what did he do? When you told him, I mean."

"Well, nothing, really."

Alya gave her an incredulous look. "Like, no reaction?"

"Oh, he was kinda stunned, I guess. But we can't date, remember? What else could he do?"

Silence came over them. 

Marinette never liked silences with Alya. Silences just weren’t a  _ thing _ with Alya.

“Marinette, who exactly told you guys you can’t date? Was it the guardian guy?”

“Master Fu?” She hesitated. “Well, he told us we couldn’t reveal ourselves.”

“And here we are.”

“Here we are, indeed.” 

She reached into her bag for her headphones, but Alya wasn’t done yet.

“Since he’s gone, who’s in charge?” she said.

“Me.”

“So, you make the rules.”

“Essentially.”

“So,  _ you’re  _ the one who said you guys can’t date?”

She snorted. There was no need for that ‘gotcha’ tone in Alya’s voice. Marinette was fully aware of her duties as Guardian, and the price she had to pay for it.

“Yeah. We don’t need feelings interfering with our teamwork.” The line rolled off her tongue, well-rehearsed.

Alya took a moment to consider this. “Okay,” she said. “Adrien has a girlfriend. And it isn’t you.”

Marinette headphones fell out of her hands, the plastic frame clattering against her bag buckle. Her head shot up.

“He… he has…?”

Alya’s face fell. “Oh— no, no, Marinette, he doesn’t. At least I don’t think so. That was meant to be hypothetical — I’m so sorry.”

Tears had sprung up to her eyes unbidden. Embarrassed, Marinette turned her head towards the ground, rubbing at her lashes with one hand and recovering her headphones with the other. 

“Why would you say something like that?” she snapped. She was glad it wasn’t true, but her racing heart and trembling hands were too far gone to be sedated by logic.

Alya hesitated. “Well… you sorta just proved my point.”

Quizzical, but also a little bitter, Marinette shot her a look.

The tension had thickened between them. Alya fiddled with the pink rib tape of the parasol, but didn’t break their gazes. “If you keep going on like this, and one of you decide to move on, don’t you think that would interfere with your teamwork, too?”

Oh.

The realisation hit her so hard she forgot to stop an expired tear from rolling down her cheek. 

Alya was right.

“Even if you didn’t have feelings for each other,” she continued, “what if you guys argued? Friends argue, right? Teammates probably argue even more.”

“We aren’t like that. We’d never argue  _ that _ badly, I can guarantee it.”

“Just like you can guarantee that dating him will mess up your teamwork?” she replied, so fast that she might’ve predicted what Marinette had been going to say. “Let’s be real, Marinette. People are complicated. Relationships and friendships are complicated. No matter how much we’d like to, we can’t predict them. Look at your mum and dad — didn’t they almost break up because of your grandfather? Twenty-four years later, and they’re still going strong.”

Across the shore, Adrien was emerging from the waters once again. His exuberance had cooled off, but a small smile still played at his lips, the flush of exultation still yet to leave his wet skin.

Marinette pulled her knees up and under her chin. “What do you think I should do?”

Alya smiled. “What I’d  _ like _ is for my best friend to honour her feelings, and to not act like she’s a fortune-teller.  _ You _ decide what you should and shouldn’t do.” Then, she stood up, dropping the parasol to the ground, and brushing the sand off of the back of her bathing suit. “I’m gonna go buy a Pepsi. Wanna come?”

“Maybe later.”

“Sure. I’ll get you one, too.” 

Alya patted her shoulder before departing, but Marinette was too busy watching Adrien. Thinking.

.•° ✿ °•.

“Come on, Nino, one last swim?”

“Sorry, dude, I’m exhausted. Isn’t it dangerous to swim at night, anyway?”

“Not when the moon’s out!” Adrien pointed up at the bright gibbous moon. He’d never seen a moon so clear before as a civilian. It looked almost as big and white as it did when he watched it from the rooftops back in Paris. “It lights everything up.”

Nino didn’t look convinced. 

Adrien felt his shoulders sag. “Alright, fine. I guess I’ll come back, too.”

“I’ll swim with you, Adrien.”

They both looked up to the voice.

Marinette descended the sand dunes and approached the shore, her polka-dotted beach towel slung over her arm. Her hair was out of its pigtails, smooth around her shoulders, catching the moonlight and shimmering with its fine sprinkling of sea salt and sand.

“I think Alya’s waiting for you back at the hotel,” she said to Nino. “She wanted to spend some time with you before we got dinner.”

Nino glanced back at him. “Well, I’d better get going then.” He threw his own beach towel over his shoulder. “Have fun, you two. Don’t swim too far from shore.”

He bid them goodbye then disappeared behind the sand dunes. Without the roar of city lights out there, once out of sight, Nino was as good as gone.

But that could’ve also been because Adrien couldn’t take his eyes off Marinette.

He knew the rules. He’d drilled them into his head, written them a hundred times in neat, readable lines on his mental blackboard like a child being punished. He’d gotten ahold of himself, for the most part. He’d had to sit on his hands for the first week after they’d revealed their identities to stop himself from grabbing her fingers and kissing her knuckles. He didn’t usually have to restrain himself much, anymore.

But with Marinette standing right there, sprinkled with sea salt and sand and scattered moonlight, the floral hem of her tankini wrinkled and ridden around her waist, Adrien thought drowning himself would hurt less than having to be so close to her and go without touching her.

She looked away from the dunes and up at him, then gave him the most radiant smile. “Shall we go?”

He smiled back. Then, in a gesture that he reserved only for her, swept an arm ahead of him. "After you, My Lady."

She took the lead, which was never a surprise for Marinette, striding up to where foam lapped at the shoreline before discarding her towel somewhere behind her. 

He seized it before it could touch the wet sand. While she pushed her hair back against the damp wind, Adrien folded her polka-dotted beach towel, then rushed a little further into the shore to place it on dry land. He returned before she turned to look for him — and before she put a leg out to wade through the water.

"Wait, wait, wait," he said, jogging up to her. He put a hand on her shoulder to stop her going any further. “The ground there is sharp. Rocks or shells, or something. Here, come this way, instead.”

Bemused, she turned her head, the moonlight illuminating the shape of her profile and her loose hair swirling into his face. For a split second, he forgot about the rules, and almost buried his cheeks and nose and lips into her sparkling hair. Almost wrapped his arms around her waist and pulled her warmth into his bare chest. 

As if he were her boyfriend. 

"Oh." She reached for his arm to steady herself. "Okay."

But then it wasn't just his arm, and wasn't just her shoulder, when their fingers somehow ended up intertwined and the dip of her back under his palm.

He didn't even realise the position they'd assumed until he'd guided her a few steps to the left, and when he did, he almost tripped on an incoming current. He couldn't do that — if not for himself, but for Marinette. If he went down, then so would she, and he didn't want her to scratch up her knees as a result.

They waded through the water together until the ground softened. By then, the hand on Marinette's was submerged under warm summer water, his swim shorts and her tankini pushing up against the current. Ahead, the moon streaked the sea like strokes of white paint. They stood there, surrounded by the quiet, heads tilted up to the stars.

"So, I was talking to Alya—"

"I remember the first time I—" 

They both stopped, looked at each other, then laughed.

"You go first," he said.

"No, you. Mine was silly anyway."

Adrien squeezed her hand. He'd ask her about it later. If he pressed, it'd just be a back and forth of 'you go first' 'no, you' until he eventually conceded.

"I remember the first time I came to the beach," he said, looking out at the ocean. A short wave, blackened by the night sky, rolled up to them and melted against their stomachs. "It wasn't all that great. I was, like, six or seven, and it was for a photoshoot. I had to stand around on the other side of the sand dunes from seven in the morning to five in the evening, and we just went straight home after that."

"That doesn't sound like a fun beach day."

He shrugged. "You take what you can get."

This time, she was the one to squeeze his hand, saying nothing. 

"I actually forgot all about it until we got here this morning. I think it was the smell of the ocean that brought it all back." He closed his eyes and inhaled deeply. Salt and water and sand and Marinette. "I remember I kept peeking over the sand dunes to look at the sea and the photographer was  _ so _ annoyed at me. So was Father.

"But when everyone went for a lunch break, Mother rolled up my pant legs and scooped me up and took me past the sand dunes to play by the water. I don't remember anything else after that, but I know I found this… this really big pebble." He laughed. "And I thought this pebble was  _ so  _ cool, I gave it to Mother as a gift. She kept it in her jewellery box ever since then. I think it might still be there."

"That's so sweet," she said. "I'm glad your mother had been there, at least."

A breeze picked up across the beach. Ripples scurried through the water — small, and in quick succession.

"What about you?" he asked. "Do you remember the first time you went to the beach?"

She thought, for a moment, before she grinned to herself, then laughed with her face up to the sky. Sea water sprayed her lashes and brows.

"Yeah. I was really young, maybe only about three or four. Papa got me this massive yellow bucket to collect sea shells, and I filled it all the way up to the top. Until I was, like, ten, I'd put a little sea shell from that bucket into envelopes with birthday cards and stuff." She made to cover her face with her hand, seemed to realise it was sopping wet, and instead just brought it over to rest on his forearm, just above their intertwined fingers. "I still have, like, half the bucket left. It's under my desk at home."

"Ouch, My Lady. Why haven't  _ I  _ ever gotten a sea shell in a birthday card?"

Marinette giggled. “At least now I know what to get you, this year.”

Adrien was no conversationalist, nor was Marinette, but whenever they talked, it made Adrien wish talking to her was the only thing he ever had to do in the world. If there were no more fencing classes, no more Chinese lessons, no more school, no more anything else other than him and Marinette and the white-streaked sea they were half-submerged in, Adrien would be happy to talk to her forever.

It wasn't like talking to people at school, or filling in the silence while someone dusted his nose with expensive powder before a photoshoot. The words they shared were ripe, filled with vitality that conversations with everyone else sucked dry within two minutes. Topics came and went like the water current, new waves of words rippling the lull in their exchanges. There was always something to talk about with Marinette — even if it was just a piece of seaweed she’d scooped up from the water surface and told Adrien it was now their new friend.

“We aren’t even swimming,” he said after an hour. Not that it mattered to him at all. He was just as happy standing in the water with Marinette, who’s hand was still intertwined with his.

She fake-gasped. “The  _ scandal _ .”

And before she could see his grin, she uprooted herself from the ground, lifted both her arms, and in one, elegant push, rolled onto her back, floating on the dark water. The water swelled under her hair and pushed it away from her back and shoulders. It was dark enough to disappear behind the membrane of the sea, but the moon brought out the halo it was shaped in with a pale smattering of light. Marinette’s eyes were closed, a smile on her face, her fingers intertwined with his. 

His heart filled with affection. If he were her boyfriend, this would have been when he’d have kissed her. Just on the cheek. Just to taste the cold, salty water on his lady’s skin and watch her bejewelled eyelashes flutter open.

Before he could do something stupid, Adrien copied her. In one quick movement, he, too, was floating.

“Can we keep holding hands?” she asked quietly. “I don’t want to float too far in.”

“Sure.” He rearranged his grip. After hearing that, it became of paramount importance for Adrien to ensure he was holding onto her as best he could.

Marinette's eyes shut once more. Adrien kept his open, making sure they didn't stray too far from shore. The wind had picked up, roughening the waters.

Floating as they were, the stars seemed to glide across the night sky, like a light machine had casted specks of white light above them. He had a hard time believing any of this was real. Evenings this perfect only happened in movies, or in those dreams he'd wake up from with the painful realisation that  _ his _ reality wasn't designed for freedom. But there he was lying in the sea, watching the light-machine stars, listening to the water current and Marinette's breaths, so late at night he wasn't sure if Alya and Nino had just gotten dinner without them.

A tough, stocky wave crashed against their legs. Adrien paddled them back from where it had shifted them.

(His little finger brushed her thigh, half of the inch he had touched being covered by her tankini. Still, it had almost sent him reeling).

"I'm really happy," he said gently.

And he had thought his words got lost between the sea and the wind, until Marinette replied, "me too."

They didn't speak after that, and he didn't mind. Adrien always thought silences were lonely until he met Marinette. They didn't have to be.

She had been so still for so long, he wondered if she had fallen asleep. Adrien glanced over at her, and found her looking straight back at him. Sand that had washed off her skin and hair speckled the water around her.

That’s when he remembered. “Oh, by the way, what were you and Alya talking about?”

“Oh. That.” She closed her eyes again, but it was different, this time. Her brow was scrunched, a certain tension in her jaw that took all the smile out of her face. “Yeah. I’d wanted to talk to you about that.”

Silence. Adrien tried to focus on the waves cutting the horizon instead of the hum of Marinette’s thoughts.

“I… talked to her about… you know, the dating thing.”

Another silence. Not a nice one.

It was the kind of silence that had followed when they had just gotten to their chocolate cake during that picnic on the Eiffel Tower, and she had told him that they could never be together, even if they knew each other’s identities. His throat was tight now just as it had been back then, when he had tried to take a spoonful of his chocolate cake and it caught halfway down his oesophagus. Her fingers were stiff in his just as they had been back then, after he had taken her hand in his and had been about to tell her how much he wanted to kiss her before she'd decided to break his heart in two.

But it wasn’t her fault back then, and it still wasn’t her fault now. She’d warmed him up to ease the blow, but it wasn’t her fault that it hurt all the same.

They were superheroes. They had duties. Adrien knew sacrifices were what made a hero, but sometimes he wished the universe would sacrifice something for him in return.

Marinette still hadn’t spoken.

Perhaps it was the little glimmer of hope that hurt the most, because Adrien had learned that hope just wasn’t made for someone like him. But the fact of the matter was that Marinette probably wanted to start moving on, and probably wanted him to move on, too, and she was too kind to just hit him in the face with a  _ hey I have a boyfriend now  _ like a normal friend would.

He loved her for it. Unfortunately.

(He just hoped this wouldn’t prompt her to let go of his hand. If he could only have this one evening holding her hand, he couldn’t bear to have it cut short).

After the silence stretched to the point of agony, Adrien decided to speak. “The dating thing,” he repeated.

“Yeah. The dating thing.”

Far ahead, the waves crashed against the surface of the sea. Their bodies bobbed under the aftermath.

“She… she really talked some sense into me. Which shouldn’t be a surprise.” She laughed to herself, fingers digging into his hand without even realising. “We were saying that… well,  _ she _ was saying that— I mean, not that this isn’t my decision, because it is, she just helped me out a bit, you know?”

Adrien tried not to let the way his heart flipped show on his face. She must’ve seen it, anyway, as she flicked her gaze away from him and back up to the moon. A current swept through the sea behind them.

“A-anyways, what I was trying to say was—”

What happened next happened fast. Adrien wasn’t sure whether the water, bunching up like fabric on a line of tight thread, had overtaken her voice, or whether she’d been stopped mid-sentence by the wave itself, hoisting tself above them and crashing down on her.

He’d gotten out of the way before he could be hit, too. Hard beads of water scattered everywhere, stinging his face. 

"Marinette!" he cried.

He was standing, now, and, after a horrible moment where she seemed to have disappeared, Marinette was, too. Her fringe was pasted to her forehead, hair clinging to her neck and cheeks. Water fell off her in rivulets, dripping off her lashes and nose and the wrinkles in her floral tankini. 

Wind blasted across the beach. A flash of mind-numbing cold rose goosebumps all over his skin; Marinette shivered hard.

"God, let's get you out of here." He put an arm around her and guided her to shore. "Are you okay?"

"I'm f-f-fine. Where's m-my t-t-towel?"

"Right over there — oh, careful of the rocks. Shells. Whatever." He tugged her to the side, keeping an eye on her gait. To his relief, she wasn't staggering.

He let go of her hand once on higher ground, where the water foamed no higher than her bare feet. Adrien hurried to her polka-dotted beach towel, still folded despite the wind, then picked his own up, too. He unfolded them both and layered them on top of one another.

It would take a long while for Marinette to stop shivering. She'd taken the brunt of that wave, her entire body having flipped into the wall of salty water that had leapt on top of her. He was shivering, too, but only because of the hour-long dip they'd spent.

(And the raw terror he had felt watching her get dragged under the sea).

"Is this—" Her sentence broke off into a cough. "Is this your towel?"

"Yours, too. On the inside." 

"Adrien!" She gave him a look, ineffectual as it was with red eyes and sea water dripping out of her nose. "You must be freezing!"

Technically, he should've been. He had no idea what time of night it was, but the lights from the pier had all disappeared, the night impossibly darker than it had already been. He was soaked from the stomach-down, the late wind cooling the water trickling down his flesh, but the blood pumped so fast and hard through his veins, he felt nothing but heat pressing against the surface of his skin.

Maybe it was from the fear. Maybe it was from the sight of Marinette, shifting from one bare foot to the other, her big blue eyes framed with wet lashes and  _ his  _ black towel tucked under her lank hair and around the shape of her body.

"I was so worried," he said instead.

Her face softened. She stepped closer, holding the towels together at her collarbone with one hand, and placing the other on his chest. Her touch on his bare skin sent fire skipping through his nerves. 

No, Adrien didn't feel cold at all.

"I'm okay," she said with a smile. "I'm here, aren't I?"

A drop of water that had been nestled in her hair dripped down her cheek.

Adrien smiled back. "Yeah. You are."

Marinette didn't mention how miniscule the incident actually had been. Wasn't this something people laughed about? As he had promised, he'd made sure to keep them close to shore, and the wave that had struck her wasn't one of those treacherous ones out of the movies, the ones as tall as skyscrapers and pushed salty water into its victims' airways. It had been but a bit of a rough tug, nothing much more than that.

Adrien knew all this. He knew he'd overreacted. But Marinette was as far from even insinuating that as she could be.

His eyes drifted down her. He caught a gap in the beach towels, where a strip of her floral tankini and quivering thighs were visible, and tightened them around her himself. Not for the first time that night, it struck Adrien how beautiful she was. Not just because of her dark hair or her freckles or whatever else he had waxed poetic over when they were fourteen. It was the way she had sat with her bare legs outstretched past the shade of the parasol and a book in her hand that evening. The way she asked Alya and Nino and even him for advice on a sewing thing, even though  _ applique  _ and  _ armsyce  _ and  _ anchoring stitch _ were all words a part of a language none of them knew. It was the way she shivered, now, dressed in his towel, her towel, and the moonlight, smiling up at him with a hand on his chest.

He couldn't say any of this, thus the silence stretched on.

Something sticking to her collarbone caught his eye. He hadn't seen it before, but she'd shifted in her stance, and now it shone under the moonlight.

Without as much as a second thought, Adrien picked the seaweed off of her clavicle. It was only about the size of his knuckle. "Look. It's our friend from earlier."

When she peered down, he stuck it on her nose.

"Gross." She pulled it off.

"You're calling our friend gross?"

"I don't want our friend on my  _ nose _ ." She reached up, and stuck it on his cheek. "Doesn't that feel gross?"

"You're hurting its feelings."

"It needs to know the truth."

Adrien took the seaweed, and put it on her forehead.

She put it on his chin.

He put it on her nose again, and Marinette did something he didn't expect.

She kissed him.

(His first thought was not to kiss back. It was to hold the beach towels around her shoulders, because, with her arms around his neck and her body pulling itself flush against his, she'd lost her grip on them).

And before he could do much other than stand there, keeping her wrapped up in those towels, she stopped, pressing her forehead to his. She smelled of saltwater and seaweed, and when she pressed the palm of her hand to his cheek, it was cold. 

"Marinette—" 

"The dating thing," she breathed. "This is what me and Alya were talking about."

He blinked down at her. The moonlight looked like gemstones on her eyelashes.

"Well, not this exactly," she clarified, glancing down at herself. She was stood on her tiptoes and her teeth were chattering. "But— well— this is stupid. The rules, I mean. I love you and you love me so why shouldn't we be together?"

Her words matched so closely to his own inner monologue he worried that none of this was real. What would he have done if he woke up in his hotel bed ten minutes later, smelling of the detergent on the bed sheets instead of the wind and the sea and the remnants of  _ her _ , to his regular reality — the one where they'd never talked the night away with their fingers intertwined and the sea up to their stomachs, where he had never wrapped Marinette up in their beach towels, where they had never taken turns in smearing a piece of seaweed on each other, where she had never flung her arms around him and kissed him?

But there was one part of what she had said that he knew was fact. That he knew was real in this reality as much as it was in any other.

"You love me," he said.

"I love you."

"Say it again."

"This is embarrassing."

He brushed his nose against hers, eyes shut, head bowed to touch hers. "Please."

He could count the number of times he'd ever had to beg her on one hand. She was never one to make someone beg. Not that Adrien was above begging when it came to Marinette.

"I love you," she said softly, electrifying the air between their mouths. "Adrien, I love you so much. I love you more than our seaweed friend. I don't know what I'm saying anymore. Stop laughing. I think I have hypothermia."

She kissed him again, harder this time, if only to disguise the trembling of her lips. 

Adrien decided that this wasn't a dream. Couldn't be a dream, because it simply wasn't perfect enough. She tasted like a saltlick and her hair got caught between their mouths and there was no way his own imagination was funny enough to replicate her ramblings. 

This was his reality, and for the first time, Adrien treasured it with all that he had.

**Author's Note:**

> tumblt: rosekasa


End file.
